Militant's Last, Sad Message

August 30, 1989|By White

As a young man, Huey P. Newton personified the armed militancy being preached in the inner cities of the late '60s. Last week police in Oakland, Calif., found the co-founder of the Black Panther Party soaking in his own blood, a victim of a drug deal gone bad.

Between Mr. Newton's revolutionary posturing and his craving for drugs and alcohol lies a confusing, often contradictory story.

It is difficult to eulogize someone around whom so much violence and crime swirled. Twice, he was tried for homicide, the last time for the murder of a 17-year-old prostitute. Right before his own death, Mr. Newton pleaded no contest to misappropriating $15,000 meant for schoolchildren.

Yet to dismiss him as a common criminal tiptoes too conveniently around conditions that gave rise to the militant Panthers. The despair of the ghettos in the mid-'60s exploded first in riots. From this spontaneous rage grew a determination to make the white establishment listen, at gunpoint if necessary.

In the eyes of Mr. Newton and his followers, crime amounted to acts of liberation, and police were seen as an occupying army. This point of view attracted numerous sympathizers, especially on campuses where radicalism had become fashionable. College classes routinely read Soul on Ice, which Panther Eldridge Cleaver published in 1968. In fleeing to places such as Cuba and Algeria to escape prosecution, Mr. Newton and Mr. Cleaver, who is now a born-again Christian, burnished their revolutionary credentials.

Yet in that same decade, a profound revolution already was occurring within America. Several years before the Panthers burst on the scene, civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had marched for laws to forbid discrimination and expand black suffrage. The growing political power of blacks owes enormously to this non-violent struggle.

Why, then, does Mr. Newton's biography haunt America?

In part, because the rage still smolders in inner cities where there are few jobs and little hope. Also because crime continues to claim the lives of a disproportionate number of America's poor black men. And finally, because Huey Newton, for all his blustering militancy, was powerless to resist the scourge of illegal drugs.

Indeed, his drug-related death sends a message as compelling as anything Huey Newton said or did.